Thermals: The Leg Test

At the end of my 2010 15-inch MacBook Pro review I mentioned that the bottom of the chassis can get uncomfortably warm. The higher peak power draw of the Core i5/i7 combined with the discrete GPU of the 15-inch MBP can result in more heat dissipated than the previous model.

The 13-inch MacBook Pro is built off a mature yielding 45nm Core 2 Duo CPU. Given how long Intel has been making this CPU it's safe to assume that this chip is running as cool as physically possible. While the mobile Core i5/i7 still have a lot of improving to go through. While the base of the 13-inch MBP can get warm under normal use (aluminum conducts heat very well...towards your lap), it's not as bad as the new 15-inch. I'd say it's pretty much on par with last year's models.

To quantify these differences I pointed an infrared thermometer at the bottom of a few MacBook Pros and reported the surface temperatures. They were taken in a room with an ambient temperature of 76F.

At idle the 13-inch MacBook Pro is about room temperature. The new 15-inch is a few degrees warmer and the 2009 15-inch is actually the warmest. Remember that the Core i7 in the 15-inch has a very low idle power thanks to Intel's power gating.

While browsing the web the temperatures climb up considerably. The new 13-inch is still cooler than anything else, while the new 15-inch model's power efficiency let's it run cooler than the previous model.

Running Half Life 2 Episode 2 changes things dramatically. Now all three machines are running at or above 90F and the 2010 15-inch MacBook Pro is finally warmer than the previous model. If I measure temperature near the exhaust fan on the notebooks the new 15-inch model peaks at 105F compared to 99F for the previous generation and 92F for the 13-inch.

In all cases the new 13-inch MacBook Pro keeps surface temperatures under control. In most situations the 2010 15-inch MBP is actually cooler than the previous generation, it's only when the dGPU is active or under heavy load that the surface temperature can go well above what the older model would do.

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93 Comments

Huh? I have a glossy screen too, abysmal is certainly not a word I'd associate with it. I'm sitting in a brightly lit room atm and having no issues with the screen at all. In a pitch dark room it's great. Yes the colours may be more accurate on the matte, however I much prefer the glossy, the contrast ratios are better and everything looks more vivid.

If yours looks that bad I suggest you get it looked at as it sounds defective.Reply

Seriously, I wish people like you could just get banned. Why do you care to comment on the article if you have nothing constructive to say? It really is just flamebaiting, and everyone knows the Mac users will never stop using Macs because of crap like that, just like it's quite apparent you'll never even try a Mac.Reply

It's my opinion and I'm entitled to express it as I see fit. I'm an avid AT reader and I will share my thoughts whenever I want, however I want, regardless of what you think. And the fact that you replied means it wasn't an irrelevant comment for you. :)

I as well have been reading AT since it began, and don't quite fancy how now every 5/10 reviews are somehow Apple related.

Okay, maybe I overreacted with the whole banning thing. I'm just sick and tired of this endless flaming it always ends up with, and it always starts with someone writing fanboi or whatever, in a comment saying "I'll never have none of that" or something else that means nothing. Why is that discussion so important to so many people? Is it a matter of pride to support x company instead of y?And that is why i decided to comment. The comment itself remains irrelevant, but the tone and the purpose of it (or at least the effect it usually has), is relevant if you value a meaningful discussion in the comments. Which i do.

I also fail to see how the amount of time you've been here is relevant at all. I've been reading the site for what i guess must be around the same time, some times more often than others, but that doesn't mean i can come here and post whatever. And if Anand prefers to write more about Macs, too bad for you, I really doubt he ever started the site for you in the first place.

And I will also state you should try a Mac seriously some time. I'm not saying buy one, but try t out somehow. Can it ever hurt? :)Reply

Totally agree. I do not think someone like Anand would care to please me - he is bright enough to do whatever he pleases with HIS site, which, I must say, is the one I fully trust in reviews and comments.

My post was not meant to be productive, constructive or helpful at all - it was a rant. I complained about something I didn't like. Sort of like "why do women get PMS?!"

I've gone through hell with Mac's, honestly. The business I own provides support for Mac and PC users alike - my latest fight was trying to get a conventional cablemodem-router network to work with a MacBook Pro, a 27" iMac, and some PCs. the MBP kept acquiring 189.170.xx.xx addys, whereas the DHCP was enabled and configured to 192.168.1.xx - setting it manually helped, but it did not enable discovery of the MBP, and could not configure a Calendar program to share schedule with the rest of the PCs.

I found them less intuitive, more complicated, hardly friendly-user than even a Windows 95 PC.

I have a PowerMac G4 and a 15" MBP (GF8500, C2D) at the office for software testing and I even tried once or twice to use them as my main working machines, but failed. Linux-failure type, you know? "It's cool, but... I just don't find my way through it".

Maybe I'm a PC fanboi. Maybe it's what I enjoy the most, besides ranting. I will take a Core i5 Alienware M11x ANY DAY over this Mac.Reply

Agreed - for a technical site there's an awful lot of Apple coverage even when there's little to write about while genuinely innovative and more technologically advanced machines are ignored. Specifically I'm surprised the site has never covered the new Sony Z series - Sony have managed to do what Apple claim isn't possible by having up to an i7 processor in a 13in chassis with an Nvidia GT 330m that's smaller and lighter than the 13in Apple Macbook as well as pack in *four* SSDs and packing a 1080p display. Despite all the power it packs, its hybrid graphics setup allows for long batterylife, it also offers an extended battery. I think there's a lot to benchmark and test there particularly the likes of Trim support and general performance of the quad SSDs.Reply

Care to mention a model number? I can only find the 13-inch Vaio VPCZ1190X on Sony's website, which comes with NONE of those features, except for a disclaimed 7.5-hour battery life. If you halved pretty much all of those specs and got rid of the GT330m, that matches the Vaio VPC1190X.

And innovative? Not really. A keyboard backlight is innovative (and Sony was beaten to the punch by a few years). Auto-adjusting screen brightness is innovative (IIRC, Alienware did this a long time ago). Utilizing an accelerometer to shutdown HDDs before crash-impact is innovative (credit to IBM ThinkPads). The multi-touch finger gestures are innovative (first saw this in X11). Switching to a LLVM compiler to transparently take advantage of GPGPU power when it's magnitudes faster/efficient than CPU computation is innovative (Apple). This Vaio laptop? This is doubling transistors among of a sea of manufacturers that believe doubling transistors is the only way to make a better PC. The 13-inch MBP gets special attention for the innovations it brings to the tech-world, while nearly all PC manufacturers depend heavily on CPU-upgrades to sell their machines. More power to AT for focusing on innovations, rather than every variant of laptop that has a few hundred more megahertz.Reply